Grainy Mozilla Firefox, what to do?

[Espi]

So, here I am.. totally disgruntled about Internet Explorer 8 which keeps crashing on me.
Enter Mozilla Firefox again which pisses me off for 2 reasons
1 near-daily updates , which slows down the use of it.. need to wait nearly every day I'm using it
2 poor readibility.

This latter thing is really very irritating as I need to have a crisp text in front of me as I don't want to punish my eyes. It is the leading cause as to why I kept going back to IE after hearing so many good things about Firefox.

How can you change those settings w/o enlarging the font size or zoom it out?

[pjb923]

1. Unless you have dozens of extensions installed, I'm not sure why you are getting so many updates. If you are in a hurry you almost always have the option to skip the updates and do them later.

2. The grainy font is most likely being caused by your computers font smoothing setting. Internet explorer will override the system setting and turn cleartype on, while Firefox will not. The best way to enable it globaly is the cleartype tuner which can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/...uner/tune.aspx

[Espi]

Originally Posted by pjb923

1. Unless you have dozens of extensions installed, I'm not sure why you are getting so many updates. If you are in a hurry you almost always have the option to skip the updates and do them later.

2. The grainy font is most likely being caused by your computers font smoothing setting. Internet explorer will override the system setting and turn cleartype on, while Firefox will not. The best way to enable it globaly is the cleartype tuner which can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/...uner/tune.aspx

Thanks a million! Will try this immediately!
As for 1 . In my 'private' pc there's a lot more fun extra add-ons than on the work pc so there's less to stress about..

And then there's yet 1 more thing. I'm using an online mailing application that spits out address labels with bar codes on them.
FF has been set to open a new tab in the same windows, but I can't make it open popups as another tab, while in IE it would open as a tab.
Since I'm sometimes making mistakes like too large format, 2 prints on same section, I'm always saving the labels that are made in case something goes wrong. It is very annoying to have 5 popups open rather than just 5 extra tabs. When one would be accidentally closed, I've got to cancel that particular shipment and make a new one as otherwise I'd pay twice for the same parcel.

Whatever I do, I can't make FF prevent from opening a new window (Tools-Options-Tabs - new pages should be opened as a new tab) . Is there another setting I don't know about? Quite obviously I've had to turn off the pop-up blocker.
It seems to be more a function of printing as the same thing happens when printing a random page.

[pjb923]

Try this addon and enable single window mode. It should prevent anything from opening in a new window.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3881

[Espi]

Thanks again.
As for the Clear Type Tuning. I've installed it about an hour ago and it doesn't really help .
Actually things got worse as the crystal clear Excel sheets became less clear as a result. Just as if the screen is blurry. Weird..

[pjb923]

Originally Posted by Espi

Thanks again.
As for the Clear Type Tuning. I've installed it about an hour ago and it doesn't really help .
Actually things got worse as the crystal clear Excel sheets became less clear as a result. Just as if the screen is blurry. Weird..

It sounds to me like you might be using an LCD monitor that is set to the wrong resolution. You need to find the native resolution of your monitor and make sure your screen resolution matches it.

[Espi]

I'm having an old-fashioned big monitor with an old-fashioned pc.
Monitor is an iiyama Vison Master 1404.
Like I said, all applications look good , except for FireFox which appears grainy. Internet Explorer looked great too, but the IE8 version is driving me nuts with the constant crashes.
FF is now driving me nuts for different reasons.. the actual fonts are OK , but the background is grainy, so maybe I've used the wrong explanation.

[DanceDiva]

Originally Posted by pjb923

1. Unless you have dozens of extensions installed, I'm not sure why you are getting so many updates. If you are in a hurry you almost always have the option to skip the updates and do them later.

2. The grainy font is most likely being caused by your computers font smoothing setting. Internet explorer will override the system setting and turn cleartype on, while Firefox will not. The best way to enable it globaly is the cleartype tuner which can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/...uner/tune.aspx

I didn't need to get the tuner. Just selecting ClearType under the display options worked for me. Thanks for asking the question Espi & thanks Paul for replying. I didn't know about this, but when I "have" to use IE for pages that don't load properly in Firefox, I had noticed the font crispness difference.